Generalised Dissatisfaction Disorder: the difficulty that will not go away
“can we want what we already have?” -Esther Perel
“we’re trying for something that’s already found us”-James Douglas Morrison
The philosopher Jagger sums our life up when he sings “I can’t get no satisfaction”. Dissatisfaction is part of our everyday life, in fact it’s so much sewn up in our living that we hardly recognise it at times and hence we’ve often caught up in it without even knowing it. There is a thought that the Buddhas notion of suffering (“dukkha”), basic to our experiencing as human beings might be better translated as dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction and its often-immediate response, distraction, can pervade our every hour.
This is the difficulty that will not go away; in fact we can even call it GDD or our General Dissatisfaction Disorder and one of the biggest impacts that this has on us is our need to do (note the operative word “do”) something about it. But it’s what we do, there’s the rub!
When we feel dissatisfied we tend to do two things, we either turn away from the dissatisfaction or turn against it, we distract ourselves in TV, gaming, the phone, shopping, any activity that appears to fill us; essentially, we’re propelled into states of distraction that become habituated and unconscious, often highly addictive, we’re “distracted from distraction by distraction” in T.S. Elliot’s words and suppressing what the mindfulness trainer Alistair Appleton calls our beingfulness
Our dissatisfaction exposes our wanting mind, which always wants something different and never wants what it has, it takes us from experiencing in depth the here and now of the present moment of being and into a heady future, past or fantasy of escape.
How can you tell if you have General Dissatisfaction disorder?
Hers a few questions that might help:
- Do you find yourself lost in thought?
- Do you use a range of 21st tech to punctuate your life and stop you from getting bored (e.g. Candy Crush)?
- Does your life feel out of focus?
- Do you always feel things should be different than what they are?
- Do you feel a stomach churning sense of dread when there’s nothing going on in your life?
If you answered yes to any of these questions you have GDD. If you got to the second paragraph of this blog and gave up, you have GDD. Actually, you can’t win: we’ve all got GDD. Every one of us.
The problem is that GDD is a trap, for in trying to do something about our dissatisfaction we’re still caught up in it. This is now doubly frustrating!
So how can we deal with the all-pervading sense of distraction that creeps relentlessly into our lives? Do we stand like Canute, helpless before its tidal wave of distractive behaviours?
No: the secret is to do nothing. The secret is that there is a third option between turning against or away from the dissatisfaction in our lives; we can turn towards the dissatisfaction and just sit with the felt experience of it, just being with it as it is, without any need to push it away or suppress it.
Sounds boring? Turn to boredom, boredom is rich in both its mental and physical experiences.
When we turn towards dissatisfaction something happens; it settles, or rather our mind settles and we begin to get in touch with our mindfulness, a sense of grounding and physicality, a felt sense of us that oddly feels like…satisfaction…
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